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Yes, there were more bugs than there ever should be in a AAA game release. Yes, it's still worth buying. If you've never played LBP games before, I would start with either LBP1 or LBP2. Each subsequent game really just adds on to the prior one, like a super massive expansion pack. LBP3 adds a ton of new innovations in almost every area, but there's a reason folks made 8 million levels in LBP2. LBP3 is not quite the beautiful brand new child that LBP1 was, nor the genius teenager of LBP2. This one has grown into something more more like a college sophomore at a good university. In the course of its hugely ambitious undertaking a lot of mistakes got made, but they are getting taken care of, and overall LBP3 has still lifted LittleBigPlanet to an even higher level of fun.

Whether you measure this game on its graphics, its faithfulness to the source material, the many signs of creative effort that went into it, or the immense amount of content and innovative gameplay offered, I find it hard to justify any rating less than 9. It's a really great game, shockingly underrated in my opinion, still (in 2014) one of the very best lego games made. For co op fun, especially parent-child team ups, this cannot be beaten. The cartoon it is based on has some aspects parents might find objectionable (like occasional character death), but it can also be great fun to watch an episode of the show and then go play that same lego gamified story level in the game.

*Reviewed after 30 hours of playing* (This game has some wonderful potential, yet see below for game play issues.) If you like city sims, I still think this one is worth checking out. The graphics are beautiful and the game play has a lot of polish and fun factor. We spent an entire weekend lost in the fun of nurturing our towns and taking pride in our metropolises. The DRM issue is offensive, the day 1 server problems were inexcusable, and the handling by EA has been somewhat contemptible. (EA refuses refunds to customers who bought the game directly from them and couldn't play it due to EA's incompetent server scheme!) But, all that said, chances are none of these thing will affect your enjoyment moving forward. The actual game is largely as good as you hoped it would be. The city land size is not huge, but it's sufficient for an interesting city to be built. Being able to follow your citizens around in full 3D really makes you feel invested in the community you're creating. The amount of detail can be a bit mind blowing. Yet there are still several issues you should be aware of: // Game Breaking Problems: - Water is a finite resource, sometimes shockingly limited, and there is no way to import it from outside the region. The workaround seems to be to have a sewage outflow pipe dump sewage in the ground, and have a water pump with only filtered pump modules running next to it. This is pretty lame. - Recycling Centers are bugged, causing them to stop working, and leading to a pile up of recyclable garbage that is followed by massive ground pollution and a crippling health pandemic. - Traffic becomes very difficult to mitigate in a city of only 200 thousand residents. There are no highways you can build, only avenues, and every intersection results in more stop and go bottlenecks. If you make a road higher capacity, that is intrinsically connected with allowing higher density buildings there. So better roads actually causes more traffic there, and don't fix the problem for long. - Sims on the road don't yield to emergency vehicles. Soon crime, fire, and health problems can't be kept in check because all service vehicles all stuck in traffic with their sirens on. Garbage collection also starts to fail completion due to traffic, and also because garbage collectors seem to only randomly wander looking for trash to collect. Thus adding more garbage trucks to one garbage center becomes less and less helpful, since they tend to clump up near that center and follow each other around, leaving distant areas without any coverage. Adding a second center, even one with no dump of its own, seems to help. The region's Wind speed starts dramatically dying down after a few game years, making wind play like an unrealistically limited resource. Annoyances: - The game must be played by connecting to one of the (now many) EA servers. These servers don't coordinate at all. You might start a city on one server, and later find it is too crowded to connect. EA says "just connect to a different one", but then that server won't have your city available, and perhaps your friends are still on the first server. Even worse, the first time you connect to each server, it makes you play through the first time player tutorial all over again. The sim is great about showing you how things are right now. But it's hard to appreciate this in context with practically no historical data available. There no longer seem to be any graphs over time, aside from population, unlike the past SimCity games. I would really like to observe cause and effect by charting things like ground pollution over time alongside health problems over time. Or city income compared to education levels over time, or any of a large number of things. - You can't upgrade a road to an avenue without destroying every building on that road. If this is your $150K municipal building, too bad, you'll have to destroy and rebuild it.

I expected this to be just ok, but now that I've got my hands on it, I'm really very impressed! As an LBP fan, I really appreciate all their attention to detail, the revitalization of prior LBP motifs, and how versatile they made the editor. The game seems more fun than the beta had been. And the brilliant player made levels already popping up are a good sign that the community is already getting revved up!

I originally rated this game a 6, and wrote the review that follows at the end here. While I feel that all of my initial criticisms are still valid, now that I've spent more time with the game (I later received it as a gift) I have grown to much more appreciate its merits, and am now revising my rating to an 8. This was largely inspired by the depth I've come to find in improving my performances at the numerous events, which is really what this game is all about. It's highly addicting to always have a new ghost rider alongside, often an xbox friend, doing just slightly better than you, and then learning one more skillful move to execute on the run and best them. Usually this is immediately followed by finding a tougher opponent's performance ready to further your challenge and keep the pressure on.. There is a lot of skill to be mastered in game, much more so than I originally gave the game credit for, and I really think folks complaining about the controls just haven't given it enough time. I also like how the game makes you "bet" on yourself and how well you can compete by forcing you to spend your own in-game currency savings on event entry fees. (Place at least moderately well and you'll win back that fee and some profit. You'll use these earnings to buy better gear, but skill will still mostly decide your performance.) There are still a lot of courses I avoid because they feature too much cheap death or not-fun gameplay for my taste, but out of the huge number of runs I've found at least a few dozen that are a blast to play, which is more than prior gen titles offered in total. And who knows, maybe you'll like some runs I hate, so there's probably something for everybody. So I'd say now, if you're on the fence, definitely give this game at least a rental, just be prepared to invest some time in really mastering it. (And don't be expecting a remake of SSX 3!) // My Original Review (original score = 6): I adored SSX 3, and happily wiled away a good many hours carving and tricking my way down the Mountain. I used to love the 20 minute long runs from summit to base and all the untouched, freshly powdered wilderness I could explore. This new game is not that SSX. It's a pretty solid game, but it just didn't do it for me. For me, in this version, most courses end up feeling pretty similar. There is some variety to be sure, mostly involving gimmicks like the wing suit, but when it comes to the bread and butter runs, it all kind of blurs together for me, and most runs are lacking in stand out moments. Maybe that's more so because this version puts marked ramps, rails (so many rails) and flare lights on every single run in the game. So there's no real back country any more, and not a single run looks truly "natural". And for all the ramp markings it does add, it seems to intentionally not mark any of the many sudden drops off into a deadly chasm. This leads to a ridiculous amount of cheap deaths on most of the harder runs until you memorize the course. This is not remotely fun. It would have made so much more sense to mark them with signs or paint or something so you could plan your lines to avoid them. What's worse is that all these fatal chasms have some kind of cloudy layer over them, that is the same color and a similar texture as the snow! So sometimes you might even see them coming over the next ledge but can't distinguish them from a safe landing spot until you're well on your way to plummeting to your death. It's kind of ridiculous, and it's so prevalent on so many runs that I'd mark down a review score point just for that. Sure there's rewind, but that eats so much time during races (the other riders keep going) that you might as well restart your run if you're serious about your finishing time. Also rewind is hard to use, because you often can't readily gauge the least amount of time you'd need to rewind to have enough control to alter course. Too often I'd rewind and then realize I was still carrying so much momentum, or that some ill fated trick was still getting ready to happen, that my fate was still sealed. The best feature is probably the online play. If you like competing they've got you covered in spades, and it seems to work great. I found myself getting addicted to competing in the global events, even as I was finding myself bored and unsatisfied with the overall game. Sure it's all a matter of doing the same thing over and over again, but if you do it enough, you can start to win and enjoy that fleeting rush of superiority. The graphics are solid, though I would have hoped for more weather effects. At least I'd have expected it to carry the bar set by its nine-years-older predecessor. Overall, it's a fine game, but if you loved SSX3, I think you'll be at least a little disappointed. Some better course designs could have improved the game so much. I'm sure many will enjoy this game, and I was glad I rented it, but I was really hoping for better..

First of all, this is an excellent game of the highest quality. There is tons to explore and do, a great many surprises, and all of it good fun. Playing as batman gives you all the best elements of being James Bond, a ninja, Sherlock Holmes, and a vampire. There is much to be praised, and yet by now most if not all of that has been covered elsewhere, so I'll just note that I agree with pretty much all of the positive reviews. I do have one rather huge objection to this game though. They somehow got it pushed through with a "teen" rating, and yet as a parent I feel strongly that it really should have been given a "Mature" rating. Particularly as when playing as the Catwoman, you find yourself constantly fending off gangs of thugs while they basically threaten to gang **** you. (They constantly taunt you along the lines of "I'm gonna make you purr for me kitten" and "let's see what's underneath that cat suit.") As she fights on through the story she begins to look bruised, filthy, cut up, and her cat suit has indeed become quite tattered. (Not in a clearly provocative way, but I still found it potentially disturbing for younger players given the context with the thugs.) I think every female character in the game gets called a **** more than once along the way, mostly by the various thugs who talk about putting them in their place. Overall I was surprised by how strong the tone of sexism was expressed. You also see cops get executed while begging for help. There is probably some other stuff too, as the game is nothing if not extremely violent, but Batman's "one rule" of not actually killing anybody (he just beats them all unconscious) keeps the bloodshed down. I'm not sure what sets the line between teen and mature, but it bothers me that many parents will buy this game for their 13 year old boys on the basis of the game's stellar ratings, without understanding what the ratings board is condoning for their children. And it bothers me that Rocksteady was not more responsible in the first place with either toning that mature content down a bit or not seeking a teen rating. And on that basis I have to give the game an 6.

If you like the Lego video game series and you like the Pirates series, then you're going to love this game. I am somewhat shocked by the lackluster media review scores this is getting, as I can't really imagine what more one could expect from this title. Some of the reviews reveal less familiarity with past Lego titles, so perhaps the reviewers don't well represent the target audience. But as someone with a family who has played all of the previous Lego games, I can say without reservation that this is exactly what we hoped it would be. The visuals and sounds are excellent, and the game play is solid. Players of the previous Lego games, especially the younger ones, will feel right at home with all the familiar mechanics, and also energized with all the rope swinging, sword play and other swashbuckling antics brought out for this new theme. All of this is rendered with the same impressive new graphics engine used in the recent Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars.

If you like the Lego video game series and you like the Pirates series, then you're going to love this game. I am somewhat shocked by the lackluster media review scores this is getting, as I can't really imagine what more one could expect from this title. Some of the reviews reveal less familiarity with past Lego titles, so perhaps the reviewers don't well represent the target audience. But as someone with a family who has played all of the previous Lego titles, I can say without reservation that this is exactly what we hoped it would be. The visuals and sounds are excellent, and the game play is solid. Players of previous Lego games, especially the younger ones, will feel right at home with all the familiar mechanics, and also energized with all the rope swinging, sword play and other swashbuckling antics brought out for this new theme. All of this is rendered with the same impressive new graphics engine used in the recent Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars.